Is there no end to the revelations of Israeli inhumanity and cruelty the Guardian bravely publishes day after day? Tuesday’s story, by Harriet Sherwood, is truly shocking. Prisoners, huge numbers of them, kept in tiny cages in Israel, barely able move, and forced to seek out their food through the wire mesh they’re caged behind. As usual, it’s a small anonymous NGO that’s brought the story to the attention of The Guardian. They’ve had a smuggled in secret camera filming a group of three of the prisoners. The story is so shocking that it’s on the front of The Guardian’s web page as a World News story, taking precedence over carnage in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechniya and other world trouble spots.

Oh, so it’s all about battery hens, not people? Well, yes, but this is Israel! That makes it a major world news story in the eyes of The Guardian. And one which can be used to evoke all those stock phrases of Israel-as-occupier cruelly persecuting and removing from their land defenceless Palestinians who have only activists with hidden cameras to defend them, whilst themselves being hunted down by the ruthless and previously totally secret hen prisoners security branch of Mossad.

There is of course the nightmarish image of rows of caged chickens in these Israeli Gitmos of the poultry world, stretching relentlessly into the distance, reduced to squatting helplessly in their iron hell as a bored guard brings the rations round.

Hang on! Isn’t there something not quite right about that picture? Yes, battery hens..clearly taken in…oh, Beijing, China. So that’s how the Guardian illustrates its shock horror story…about Israel.

Well, no. Not at all. In fact that home page of Tuesday’s web Guardian has not so much as a single link to the Cameron and Chinese prisoners and human rights story, whereas it was thetop story on the web site of its ideological soulmate, the BBC News site. The imprisoned Nobel prize winner was the top story on the web site of its other ideological soulmate in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, the Independent.

OK, then. We know that there are political prisoners everywhere. So how could a trivial non event like the plight of an imprisoned Nobel prize winner in China begin to compare with the horrors of Israel’s caged battery hens, surely unique in the world?

After all, how many caged battery prisoner hens are around anywhere today?

Ooops! Seems there are a socking 390,000,000 egg laying hens in the European Union, always so ready to tell Israel howto be more humanitarian, of which over two thirds are kept in battery cages. So that’s way over 200,000,000 EU battery hens. Of which at least 16,000,000 are imprisoned in Britain today. And not a single Guardian editorial tear being shed for any of them. Tuesday or any other day recently. But the plight of Israeli battery hens? Shocking headline news. Caged prisoners. Guardian front page story.

This is insidious Nazi-like propaganda. It is psywar, not to be dismissed as silly. Now Judy does a good job. Recall that the Nazis dehumanized Jews before mass-murdering them. The psywar dehumanization was essential to the Nazi project of genocide. Recall the Nazi film, Der Ewige Jude [the Eternal Jew]. There are scenes from a slaughterhouse in Warsaw where Jewish shohatim [ritual slaughterers] are killing animals. There is also a scene where Jews are likened to rats running to or from a sewer [or whatever is in that rat scene].

Of course, whoever eats meat has to have it slaughtered, and as Judy points out there are many more millions of caged chickens in Europe than in Israel. The Germans in Hitler’s time were meat eaters, especially pork eaters. These beasts had to be slaughtered somehow and somebody had to do the work. Were the non-kosher slaughter-houses any more humane than the kosher abattoirs in Warsaw?? As a child I used to live near a pig abattoir and I used to hear the squeals of the pigs as they were hoisted up on a chain before slaughter. How humane was that slaughter? So the films from the Warsaw kosher abattoirs may have been true in themselves. But no comparison was made with non-kosher slaughterhouses. Likewise, it seems that the Guardian made no comparison of Israeli commercial chicken houses or runs with chicken houses or runs anywhere else, particularly not in Europe. This is of course gross hypocrisy. But it is more than that. It is insidious Nazi-like dehumanization of Israel and consequently of Jews. We can now rightly say that the Guardian makes Nazi-like anti-Jewish, anti-Israel propaganda. Or shall we call it Nazi-style psychological warfare?

The headline is silly because the real – and positive – story here is that Israel is having a parliamentary vote on banning battery cages. I think the EU is planning such a move – but is there a similar debate acually going in e.g. the UK?

The reason for the selection of the photograph, according to a secret camera an NGO planted in the Guardian’s Jerusalem office, is that someone mentioned to ChickenLady Sherwood that there is a village in Israel called Pe’kin where Jews have lived for thousands of years.

In a sad commentary on the state of British education, the editors confused this village with another location, once known as Peking to the British, and assumed it was shot at the location of that magnificent undercover operation by the brave chicken webcammers.

(ChickenLady seems to have completely lost it, by the way – they need to put her on a plane to the Sudan or somewhere quieter than Israel urgently).

Are we expected to believe that this was a Mossad coup (er.. coop?) – who else would be able to install a webcam next to some chickens?

“The camera equipment was installed inside a chicken coop in Israel during a complex operation run by Anonymous’ investigation team. ”

Of course, it is possible that the Chicken NGO thing was a send-up – just look at what they wrote:

“Israel is planning to re-build the whole infrastructure of the egg industry, partially with public funds. We see it as an historic opportunity to change the cruel battery-cages with non-cage coops.

In the thousands of years of history in the Holy Land, does this really rank up there with, say, rebuilding the Temple?